Jane Lapotaire is now onstage after suffering a brain hemorrhage.Courtesy of Jane Lapotaire/BAM

Performing Shakespeare would be a feat for any 71-year-old. For Jane Lapotaire, it’s a miracle.

In 2000, while teaching in Paris, the English actress collapsed onstage in front of her students. “Next thing I knew, I was staring into this bowl of red stuff,” she says. “I was [throwing] up blood from my brain.”

She’d been felled by a brain hemorrhage. It took doctors three days to find the bleeding, and a six-hour operation to stop it.

Luckily, Lapotaire’s memory wasn’t affected, and she’s now appearing onstage for the first time in the US since her injury, in “Richard II” and “Henry V” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

There were other problems, though, including a lack of stamina and issues with depth perception.

She now carries a card identifying her as a brain-injury survivor so that she can skip airport scanners (she has a titanium plate in her skull), and to help people understand her occasionally odd behavior.

“You go through a complete character change,” Lapotaire says. “When I get tired, I suffer from disinhibition.”

Meaning? “I have no filter” — as in, she says exactly what she thinks.

But while she’s keen to inspire fellow survivors, she knows that no two brain injuries are the same. “I don’t want to give false hope or discouragement,” she warns. “It’s a complete miracle that I’m alive.”